Featuring Women's History, Women Authors, Writing In General, And Author Interviews. Home of the Teresa Thomas Bohannon author of the Historical, Paranormal Romance, Shadows In A Timeless Myth, the Regency Romance Novel, A Very Merry Chase, and the illustrated version of Jane Austen's posthumously published Juvenilia, The Widow's Tale.

just to say thank you for stopping by so please read on for details....

A Very Merry ChaseNow available...in an easy to read oversize, large print paperback version.Was Happy To Participate In

The Autumn Harvest Fall Between The Pages

Giveaway Hop

September 19 - 26, 2011

I am providing two gifts just to thank everyone for stopping by plus the opportunity to win a personalized PDF copy of my sweet, old-fashioned Regency Romance Novel, A Very Merry Chase for one lucky commenter.

Smiles & Good Fortune,
Teresa
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It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one’s dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent. W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) Of Human Bondage, 1915

The Stoic in woman has been seen once only, and that in the only woman in whom there has been seen the paradox of passion without sensuousness. Emily Brontë lived with an unparalleled energy a life of outward quiet, in a loneliness which she shared only with the moors and with the animals whom she loved. She required no passion-experience to endow her with more than a memory of passion. Passion was alive in her as flame is alive in the earth. And the vehemence of that inner fire fed on itself, and wore out her body before its time, because it had no respite and no outlet. We see her condemned to self-imprisonment, and dying of too much life.

Her poems are few and brief, and nothing more personal has ever been written. A few are as masterly in execution as in conception, and almost all have a direct truth of utterance, which rarely lacks at least the bare beauty of muscle and sinew, of a kind of naked strength and alertness. They are without heat or daylight, the sun is rarely in them, and then 'blood-red'; light comes as starshine, or comes as:

hostile light
that does not warm but burn.

At times the landscape in this bare, grey, craggy verse, always a landscape of Yorkshire moors, with its touches of stern and tender memory, 'The mute bird sitting on the stone,' 'A little and a lone green lane,' has a quality more thrilling than that of Wordsworth. There is none of his observation, and none of his sense of a benignant 'presence far more deeply interfused'; but there is the voice of the heart's roots, crying out to its home in the earth.

At first this unornamented verse may seem forbidding, may seem even to be ordinary, as an actual moorland may, to those for whom it has no special attraction. But in the verse, as on the moors, there is space, wind, and the smell of the earth; and there is room to be alone, that liberty which this woman cried for when she cried:

Leave the heart that now I bear,

And give me liberty.

To be alone was for her to be alone with 'a chainless soul,' which asked of whatever powers might be only 'courage to endure,' constancy not to forget, and the right to leave the door wide open to those visions that came to her out of mere fixed contemplation: 'the God of Visions,' as she called her imagination, 'my slave, my comrade, and my king.' And we know that her courage was flawless, heroic, beyond praise; that she forgot nothing, not even that love for her unspeakable brother, for whom she has expressed in two of her poems a more than masculine magnanimity of pity and contempt; and that at all times she could turn inward to that world within, where her imagination waited for her,

Where thou, and I, and Liberty

Have undisputed sovereignty.

Yet even imagination, though 'benignant,' is to her a form of 'phantom bliss' to which she will not trust herself wholly. 'So hopeless is the world without': but is the world within ever quite frankly accepted as a substitute, as a truer reality? She is always on her guard against imagination as against the outer world, whose 'lies' she is resolved shall not 'beguile' her. She has accepted reason as the final arbiter, and desires only to see clearly, to see things as they are. She really believed that

Earth reserves no blessing

For the unblest of heaven;

and she had an almost Calvinistic sense of her own condemnation to unhappiness. That being so, she was suspicious of those opportunities of joy which did come to her, or at least resolute not to believe too implicitly in the good messages of the stars, which might be mere dreams, or of the earth, which was only certainly kind in preparing for her that often-thought-of grave. 'No coward soul is mine' is one of her true sayings; but it was with difficulty that she trusted even that message of life which she seemed to discover in death. She has to assure herself of it, again and again: 'Who once lives, never dies!' And that sense of personal identity which aches throughout all her poems is a sense, not of the delight, but of the pain and ineradicable sting of personal identity.

Her poems are all outcries, as her great novel, Wuthering Heights, is one long outcry. A soul on the rack seems to make itself heard at moments, when suffering has grown too acute for silence. Every poem is as if torn from her. Even when she does not write seemingly in her own person, the subjects are such disguises as 'The Prisoner,' 'Honour's Martyr,' 'The Outcast Mother,' echoes of all the miseries and useless rebellions of the earth. She spells over the fading characters in dying faces, unflinchingly, with an austere curiosity; and looks closely into the eyes of shame, not dreading what she may find there. She is always arguing with herself, and the answers are inflexible, the answers of a clear intellect which rebels but accepts defeat. Her doubt is itself an affirmation, her defiance would be an entreaty but for the 'quenchless will' of her pride. She faces every terror, and to her pained apprehension birth and death and life are alike terrible. Only Webster's dirge might have been said over her coffin.

What my soul bore my soul alone

Within itself may tell,

she says truthfully; but some of that long endurance of her life, in which exile, the body's weakness, and a sense of some 'divinest anguish' which clung about the world and all things living, had their share, she was able to put into ascetic and passionate verse. It is sad-coloured and desolate, but when gleams of sunlight or of starlight pierce the clouds that hang generally above it, a rare and stormy beauty comes into the bare outlines, quickening them with living splendour.

Compiled From Sources In The Public Domain.

Smiles & Good Reading,
Teresa
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It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one’s dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent. W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) Of Human Bondage, 1915

Hello and Welcome

I love women's history, but even more, I love women's historical fiction. Why? A favorite quote of mine about history in general and Women's History in particular, from perhaps the world's most famous Woman Author, sums it all up perfectly.

"I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes' mouths, their thoughts and designs— the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books."Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen.

Thank you for visiting,Teresa Thomas BohannonAuthor of A Very Merry ChaseAnd Shadows In A Timeless MythAvailable for Kindle, Nook & now...also in Large Print Paperback.PS: The links on this page that lead to pages (usually on Amazon) where purchases can be made, are affiliate links which help to support this blog.

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About Me

Teresa Thomas Bohannon is a published author, web designer, hosting & domain provider & (occasional) internet marketing consultant. Teresa founded Spun Silk Web Design in December of 1995 as one of the first free standing female owned web design firms in the country.
As of late, Teresa has returned to her roots, utilizing the exciting new world of online publishing to present a backlog of original novels and short stories to the world--beginning with A Very Merry Chase--a Regency romance novel which she originally wrote some 35 years ago. :) In late 2011 she published Shadows In A Timeless Myth a Paranormal Historical Fantasy/Romance/Horror Novel.
Teresa holds an MA in history--with a haphazardly obtained--concentration in women's studies. In addition, she is the Director of Human Resources for a non-profit agency.
Teresa's personal cause is revitalizing literacy by reading "with" children.